


Distortion Party (She Wants the D(estructio+n o+f the Patriarchy) Remix)

by lantadyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-21
Updated: 2013-03-21
Packaged: 2017-12-06 01:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/730175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/pseuds/lantadyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She thought they were all working to escape this hellish game. He makes her wonder if she's been thinking wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Distortion Party (She Wants the D(estructio+n o+f the Patriarchy) Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tawnyPort](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawnyPort/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Mysterium Fidei](https://archiveofourown.org/works/604715) by [tawnyPort](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawnyPort/pseuds/tawnyPort). 



The dreambubble shudders with remembered thunder. Porrim can taste the rain in the back of her throat. She watches as the prisms set into the church's stained glass windows cut the lightning into a million lines of color on the white plaster walls, and she knows which memory this is. She knows the last time she stood here in this place, her soaked clothes dripping into the long strip of indigo carpeting, the carved wooden doors still fluttering closed behind her. 

(The homeless shelter had been warm and safe until that girl had backed her into a stall in the bathroom and pressed the point of a knife to Porrim's jugular, called her a mutant jade freak and swore to cut her open if she didn't leave. Most trolls had never seen a jadeblood before; they were all confined to the brood caverns. She had her lipstick in hand but she didn't want to kill anyone, even one young disenfranchised racist. She left without waiting to put her shoes on, running barefoot through the rain and glancing frequently behind her, heart racing as she searched for somewhere dry to hide in the scary hour before sunrise.)

Her chest burns with adrenaline in déjà vu. She has to touch her hair to break the mirage—it's still long, not shorn short in compliance with the strict rules of the caverns. She's dry. She's safe. (She's dead.)

And then she sees the boy slumped in one of the pews down the aisle before her, his god tier pajamas the same indigo as the carpeting. Porrim knows one thing for sure: he is not a ghost of this memory.

She's heard rumors through the bubblevine about the little indigo Alternian gone rogue, listened to Kanaya rant and rage about the clown she hates so furiously it's the inverse of sexual. Sprawled out limp and ragged in his seat like this he's less the villain all that hype had painted him out to be. He's thin and gawky, the tinsel of the Bard outfit doing nothing to add dignity to the lazy cant of his limbs, the shitty satin fabric posing as the wings he's abandoned on the floor. Porrim's footsteps are swallowed by the carpet as she walks down the aisle toward him. 

She sets one hand loosely on the corner of the pew back. "I don't think we've met, brother."

He gives her no startled reaction. His eyes are hard and guarded and yellow as life when he turns them on her, his mouth curled up in a sneer. "I ain't no motherfucking brother of yours."

His posture is all threat, intimidation worn with precision and practice. He means to scare her from the church—but this is her dream, this is her memory, and Porrim grips the back of the pew until her knuckles turn white. She nurses the anger bubbling deep inside herself, reminded of how sick she is of boys treating her like she's not worthy to be on their level. 

"No, I suppose not," she says back, a dash of his sneer in her own voice. "But I'm Maid of Space and I have an inherent _feel_ for these bubbles. You're trespassing in my dream and don't think for a second that I won't boot your sorry ass out if you can't show some manners."

He opens his mouth again, spite on his tongue, but she cuts him off, one thin hand held out in a solid and demanding greeting between them. She refuses to let him talk down to her. "Porrim Maryam. You're a Makara. I don't quite remember your name, but I see the resemblance."

He's still seated, eyes locked on her. There's a trace of Kurloz in his face but he wears his emotion in his features whereas Kurloz never did. The back of the pew obscures most of him but she sees the annoyance in his posture and the easy way annoyance leads to rage and violence without a hand to steady him. She won't be that hand, but she's been a revolving quadrant enough to be able to pick the signs out of someone just by looking. Then he flips like a train rail from anger to amusement, and a sly, dangerous grin spreads over his scarred face.

"Gamzee." He twists in his seat, slaps his giant palm to hers. His fingers clamp down like a vice and for a moment Porrim is scared by more than just the cool wet blood on his skin. "Gamzee Makara. This hang is your dream? I ain't never seen a place like this one before."

Gamzee Makara. She knows that name now that she hears it again. Porrim licks her lips once and feels a cold realization start to spread in her stomach. It's been more than a million sweeps but clarity still crystallizes in her memory like an icicle. That's the name of the Grand Highblood, a man nearly as renowned as the Empress herself, who wielded real political power, who didn't inhabit the figurehead roll the Empress did. Porrim falls silent with wide eyes as she processes that she is standing in the presence of a child version of one of the most powerful trolls on her long destroyed planet. 

"You've never seen a church of the Mirthful Messiahs before?" she asks instead of the thousand questions swirling in her head.

He catches her spooked silence anyway and smiles with too many teeth, fond of his ability to tip people into discomfort. "The church didn't fucking exist when I believed. It was all up and buried in history. I was the one to dig it out again, _sister_." He says it like a joke more than a slur, but it makes Porrim prickle all the same. She owns her identity entirely but she still feels the labels people throw at her like stones. And he's more than aware of what he's throwing at her. She turns her lipstick over in her free hand.

The lightning flashes again, the prisms splitting the flash into colored glitter on the interior of the church. "This, though. This is something else." He stands now, one hand pressed to his stomach. The back of the pew in front of him creaks as he leans heavily against it. "This is my motherfucking church, isn't it?"

In the dark between flashes he's nothing but a dangerous white smile and two yellow eyes reflecting the light like a demon. He's used to pushing people's fears as an easy strategy to him getting what he wants. Porrim wonders exactly what that means for his friends.

"I don't need to be a part of this conversation if you can answer all your own questions," Porrim says. She wants to know what's in his head, what he plans to get out of stopping here and talking to her. If there's one thing she knows from her studies of Beforan society, she knows that Gamzee Makara moves civilizations. She doubts this is an idle play. 

"Yes or fucking no?" he spits through a sudden snarl.

His body language is tuned to spook her, but she is dead and she is strong and she absolutely refuses to fall into the traps he finds convenient. She answers him in the same bored tone she answers all of Kankri's backhanded questions. "You were the Highblood."

He already knew that but a deep laugh bubbles out of him anyway, amused and disgusted all at once. "The motherfucking Grand Highblood. All up and got myself a church and everything. Led the whole thing my fucking self." His hand goes up, points in the dim light to the stained glass windows domed over the ceiling. To the depiction of the Highblood as priest. "Bent the shitpeasants to my blood will. A million sweeps and a universe away and I still up and rotted out my thinkpan on this bullshit fucking faith."

He did lead it himself. He did stand up with his ancient scriptures and change the ideology of a sliver of the population, who spread it further in turn. He did have the people halfway in his pocket with his propaganda and his underground deals with the violet caste and his speeches on television on how everything he implemented was for the good of them all, even the policies that only deepened the divide between the low castes and the high. Even the policies that made sure the jadebloods stayed down in the caverns and the Empress never left the seas. 

Gamzee Makara denouncing the faith isn't something that puts Porrim at ease. She's not sure if he's looking for what makes her tick so he can fuck with it or if he's just ranting, gloating to a dead peon because he can. Because he's the Highblood and the Highblood always does as he pleases. All she knows is that he's used to getting what he wants and frustrating people into agreeing with him. She refuses to back down from that stand. Even if she's long dead, she is sick of those who think complacency is the only response to inequality and the disenfranchisement of the masses. 

"It's not bullshit. There's always been more to the clown cult than what was taught and whatever you believed. People always confuse the church as an institution with faith, but churches do so much more than hold chapel and offer sugary, multicolored sacrifices to the polka gods. These churches helped people when they had nowhere else to turn. They sheltered and clothed people, fed them after their lusii died. Helping the needy was done under the guise of spreading the faith, yes, but that doesn't take away the impact they had on the impoverished in Beforan society."

"FUCK YOUR SOCIETY," he bellows, eyes mad. "Fuck EVERY society. You think some insignificant dead-ass gutterblood matters when it's all fucking lies?"

"Maybe the faith was shitty and everyone involved was misinformed and brainwashed by the _man on top_ , but that doesn't change that they took people off the streets and helped them," she says slowly, voice held strong and calm despite the fire burning in her breast. (Because they helped her. Took her in out of this wet remembered morning and wrapped her up in one of the blankets the priestess had tucked into the hymnal cabinet just in case. Walked her through the hallways to the kitchen and sat her down in front of the oven to warm the chatter out of her teeth and the chill out of her bones. And yes, she heard the story of the Messiahs, but nothing was forced on her but good will and a washcloth dipped in sopor for the daymares.) "But you're not the Grand Highblood now and you wouldn't care about those lower than you. You only care about your Messiahs. You did abandon your friends for a wild goose chase, after all. "

"The Messiahs don't motherfucking exist, sister," he says with a quiet sneer that's turned inward as much as it's turned on her. "They never did." He's still standing, leaning against the back of the pew. He spreads his hands out in front of himself, studies his palms. In a flash of lightning Porrim sees the cold indigo blood that drips from his outstretched fingers onto the wooden seat of the pew in front of him. "But they will exist. I'm gonna make sure."

She sees the ugly purple gash across his stomach now, sees the jagged bites all up his bloody arm and the bruises pressed into his grey skin. He looks like he's been mauled by a space dragon. The hollows around his eyes are ringed with dark circles even where the paint has been smudged away. He looks terrible. 

He looks like Porrim did as the Dolorosa, bedraggled and exhausted, trying to learn to care for a grub her species had forgotten how to raise. She swallows, not wanting to believe.

"How are you going to do that?" 

"Like you said it yourself, sister. I created the faith. The timeline is all up and knotted to shit but in the end I'm the one that creates it." He laughs, bitter and cold. "I've had the motherfucking blasphemy sting seared into my pumpbiscuit. I'm gonna create god." And now he's grinning ear to ear, all teeth and irony. "Got two little fucking baby gods I'm gonna train up and helltemper just like my old man did me, and when I'm done with them there will only be one. The most powerful motherfucker ever to walk the miracle galaxy edge."

"You're insane," Porrim mutters, her whole body held tight and ready to move should she need. 

Instead of an affirmative he says: "You've all up and heard of him. Your little spiderbitch homie talks up a storm about the demon to a fuckton of deafbored ears. And I'm the ninja in the shadows."

Her heart races as the mystery falls apart. He's raising Lord English—the monster who will destroy everything and doom them all. In this one premeditated act he has committed four counts of genocide, sent four universes into a mess of chaos and destruction just to fudge the foundations of his faith. Porrim cannot wrap her mind around it. She twists her lipstick, hears her weapon roar to life in the hollow rain-patter of the empty church.

He's too fast. Musicbox prisms appear at his outstretched fingertips, purple blood dripping from his wounded hand onto the bluish crystal. They're pretty replicas of the devices Porrim remembers Damara using to spin her way backward and forward through time. She feels a new depth of betrayal wash over her, wonders at Damara's involvement in all of this. Gamzee grins and before she can move to stop him he's disappeared in a flash of clattering music, the colors settling everywhere in his wake.

"Shit!" Porrim growls through a snarl, hacking her weapon spitting and chipping through the solid, finished wood of the pew he's left stained with his ugly indigo blood. If she'd been a split second faster she could have ended it. She could have cut him down and undone it all. 

(And stranded her friends in one of the doomed timelines she feels at the edge of her spatial senses, dangerous and so so close.)

She twists her lipstick back into one hand, standing there puffing with adrenaline and confusion and bare rage. The dreambubble ripples backwash around her from his sudden departure and her explosion of violence. How could he do this? She's spent millennia with her friends watching and clinging to hope that someone could win this game and free them all—and Gamzee Makara chooses to do the exact opposite. Leave it to a highblood to ruin reality just so he could never be proved a fool.

She turns back toward the doors of the remembered church, clicking her tongue against her teeth to bleed off the anger that's lit her skin up like a lamp. She can't stay here and replay it over and over in her mind until she's collected and calm, those bare emotions honed into a knife. There's more at stake here than Porrim's proper appearance. 

She has to tell Meenah and Aranea.


End file.
